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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Thanks Kane - I've managed to make the case for a real-simple "download preview pdf" link so at least I feel comfortable that they won't lose too much of this "hidden" traffic.
It would still be nice to understand how <embed> is handled and whether any link-equity passes though the embed. Tight deadlines on projects don't mean you have time to experiment.
One site that I'm working on has previously had a great deal of success from the pdf preview content on the site. The pdf previews are quite substantial and rank for many many long-tail terms that drive a reasonable amount of traffic back to the site to purchase the full version of the product.
As part of a site redesign, the way the pdf previews are embedded/presented on the page is changing slightly:
The proposed modal pop-up on the new site the code looks like thie:
<object data="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf" style="width:100%; min-height:600px; max-height:100%;max-height:100%;"><embed src="my-pdf-preview.pdf" type="application/pdf"></object>
Where as the old code looked like this:
<object data="mt-pdf-previewpreview.pdf#view=FitH,50&scrollbar=1&toolbar=0&statusbar=0&messages=0&navpanes=0" <br="">type='application/pdf'
width='100%'
height='600'>It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files.
No worries, you can download the PDF file here.</object>
Note: how previously the code contained a plain, standard link to the pdf document.
My worry is that without this link, search engines won't a) be able to discover/crawl the pdf content or b) pass any link-equity to these pdfs.
Does anyone have any experience/recommendations about this? I'd like to have some information before I request that they add a plain link to the pdf previews back onto the on-page content.
Hi,
On the keyword ranking page in your campaign there's a button on the right hand side, just above the graph that you can use to send yourself an email with all the historic ranking data in .csv format.
It includes ranking data for you and any competitors that you've set up on all of the search engines you set up in your campaign.
For some of my campaigns, this goes back years!
Was there other historic search data you were trying to get?
What's the purpose of the home page? Is it purely navigational? Does it have any unique content on it?
Hard to assess whether there's a real problem or not and what that problem might be without taking a look at the site.
I don't think it matters, but without knowing more about your site it's hard to say for certain.
See this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-command-ranking-12858.html
What's more important is that you have the right page getting visibility for the right keywords/topics so that you provide the best user experience and increase your chances of converting those visitors into customers/followers.
What page is coming up first? Can you make any guesses as to why?
What I have use the site: search for is to look at the top 10 pages and assess how well these reflect the products/services/topics for which the site wants to be associated with.
It might be a better user experience to create a specific landing page for these services at either the old URL or using a 301 redirect from the old service page to the landing page. The page doesn't have these visible in the menu and explain to visitors that the service is no longer being offered by present the partner site as an alternative.
That way the redirect doesn't come as a surprise, it provides some value to your visitors (who'll be able to find someone offering the service) and give you partner site a link.
Would your client be happy to referrer real life leads to the partner/friends site?
How big is the site in question? How many pages are there to de-index?
What does Google Webmaster Tools tell you about the old domain? Does it show pages being removed from the index over time?
If you do a site:{old domain} query, can you see that the number of results being returned is gradually decreasing?
How have you implemented the redirects?
Have you submitted a change of address request in Webmaster Tools?
On the new website, have you submitted a sitemap fom the old website as well as the new one?
What does the backlink profile on the old domain look like? Can you start to get authoritative links to the old site updated? What about any embedded internal links in your content - have they also been updated?
More guidance from Google here:
The disavow tool isn't going to "fix" these 404s.
404's aren't always a bad thing. The warnings in GWT are just there to make you aware that there's potentially a problem with your site. It doesn't mean there IS a problem.
Is there content on your site that visitors clicking on these links should be arriving at? In which case you want to implement 301 redirects so that your visitors arrive on the most appropriate pate.
If there's nothing relevant on the site any more - a 404 error is perfectly acceptable.
Of course, you want to make sure that your 404 page gives the visitors the best chance/incentive to dig into the content on your site. Adding a nice obvious search box and/or links to most popular content may be a good idea. If you're getting lots of visitors from a particular site that you can maybe tailor your 404 message depending on the referrer.
The drawback here is that links pointing at 404 error pages won't pass link-equity. If there is value in the links, and you're happy that they're going to be seen a natural/authentic as far as google is concerned then you can always 301 redirect these.
Where you really should pay attention is where you have internal links on your site that are reporting 404s. These are under your control and you really don't want to give you visitors a poor experience with lots of broken links on your site.
The performance of your snippet on the search result pages can be pretty variable and affected by a whole host of things.
The first big problem is advertising. If your ranking #1 on a SERP that has a high volume of ads then they will be diminishing the visibility of your site.
The ads you're competing with have a big advantage over your organic SERP. It's much easier for the advertiser to put specific language in their ad to entice searchers to click through. Matching the users intent and adding compelling benefits / reasons why they should visit their site. (eg: Prices you can't beat, free estimates, fitted in 1 day etc...)
Your snippet describes your business but it doesn't tell me "what's in it for me?" if I click though on the link. Your first words are "Custom Fabricator" which causes me some friction - This sounds like you might be b2b. Do you sell stuff direct to customers?
EGOL has some great advice about sharpening up your snippet.
You've got some reviews and testimonial - What is it that really matters to your customers? Sometimes it's not always what you think it is, or described in the language you'd use (as you're in the trade).
Another question is how much traffic is there for this search term and how "SEO" aware are your competitors. I've noticed that for some competitive terms the real search volume isn't as high as you think it is. I've come to the conclusion that certain terms can be inflated due to the amount of rank tracking going on!
How are your other keywords performing? Are you getting better results from keywords like "granite counter installation St Louis" for instance? Can you compare the CTR between keywords with a similar intent?
The thing is, you don't know what a good CTR for that particular SERP is. You don't know what you competitors (in ads, organic and local) are getting so it's difficult for you to say if you're earning your fair share.
Well the good news is, after all that, the development server is now safely behind authentication and the level of traffic to the site has returned to previous levels for the last three weeks. Fingers crossed it won't be going anywhere.
It has been a wake-up call for the client though and it's started some useful discussions. Every cloud...
Thanks for the support!
Ad then, just as I say that - I see the following article:
Google's Update From Last Week Reversing Itself?
Sigh
Tracking rankings on this site is pretty impossible. Keywords/queries sending traffic are completely dependant on that day/week/months news stories. (I've come in late to this one - the client isn't tracking any specific keywords.)
Traffic appears to have suddenly reverted to "normal". Yesterday's traffic was right back to where we'd expect it to be and today is looking pretty good too. I'm looking to see if there's a similar correlation with SERP volatility (which I'd guess you'd expect if there was an algorithm update at play...)
I still feel as if I'd put my money on the large volume of links moving around.
Hi Jane,
As is all to frequent - it's a bit like hitting a moving target...
I don't believe there have been any other changes to the site, but I can't confirm that with anything approaching absolute confidence.
The one thing to be aware of is that links to this site are generated automatically based on the way news articles are tagged on "sister sites". This means that there's a considerable ebb and flow of links pointing to the site.
The development site that was pointing all these links additional links to the target site has now been placed behind some authentication (this happened a week or so ago). Even though some of the links from this site had be rediscovered before that was done - there was no sign of any upswing.
Nothing that I'm aware of has changed, but over the weekend/today we're now seeing a significant improvement in organic traffic (it's too early to talk about a recovery though.) GWT is also started showing a lift in the impressions too. We'll need to see what happens over the next couple of days.
I don't think that the disappearance of the links happened on exactly the same day as the site lost it's traffic. All I can tell is that ahrefs reported the -17k links on the same day. I've not been able to establish when exactly the links were removed. (Important lesson for the web developer here - make sure you keep a decent change-log!)
Following David's tip off, I did a bit of digging around any updates that may have affected things.
Mozcast showed a couple of days of activity on the 17/18th and Rank Ranger had an indication of an update at the same time. Serpmetrics etc also had similar indications.
Unfortunately I've not managed to get any info on the kind of sites/pages that were affected or what features they might have had in common so it's hard to say whether we're looking at the impact of a update on google's side or whether it's the links/local changes that are the cause. (Or some combo of the two!)
The good news is that it's been a wake-up call to the client. They now realise that the site in question has some significant weaknesses that need to be addressed and can't/shouldn't just rely on these "unnatural" links from their sister sites!
"Keep calm, don't panic and don't over-react!"
Hi David, do you have any details? If this is the case it would be nice to compare sites and see what the common factors might be.
I don't think it's affected any anchor ratios. The is a huge level of diversification in the anchor texts used. 17k out of 900k isn't a large proportion.
The interlinking from sister sites has been in place for a long long time - it's not something that's been added recently.
I've dropped you a PM.
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic.
This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks.
The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT.
When I investigated I found:
I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery.
The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.)
Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?)
Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url.
The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been.
This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities".
Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned.
